The US-Mexico Border / Anti-Trump Hysteria Story is Largely Nonsense

Michael Lumish

{Also published at Jews Down Under.}

Here is why.

There are nine US consulates in Mexico and one US embassy.

Anyone looking to emigrate into the United States from Mexico does not need to do so by crossing the border illegally. They can, instead, apply for access, resident status, and citizenship through normal legal channels.

The US consulates in Mexico include those in Ciudad Juárez, Guadalajara, Hermosillo, Matamoros, Merida, Monterrey, Nogales, Nuevo Laredo and Tijuana. The US embassy, naturally, is in Ciudad de Mexico.

Thus anyone who lives in Mexico who wishes to move into the United States can go through normal channels of application.

I recognize, of course, that this is not necessarily easy but, in truth, it should not be easy.  The United States has not only the right, but the obligation, to do what it can do to make sure that criminals and jihadis are not given carte-blanche access to American citizens or their children. As an American Jew, I resent the glib way in which "progressives" are perfectly happy in releasing theocratically-fascistic jihadis into a country that prides itself on being a haven for Jewish people.

Furthermore, I resent the way that American concerns over illegal immigrant violence is shrugged-off.

I feel reasonably certain that the family of recently murdered Kate Steinle would agree.

I have referred to this before but will do so again.

My father came through Ellis Island in the early 1920s in the arms of my grandmother, Sarah.

They fled the pogroms and ran from my father's birthplace in the town of Medzhybizh in the western Ukraine. Despite having relatives in Brooklyn, NY, they failed to gain visas into the United States and escaped to Argentina where my grandfather died.

Shortly thereafter the visas came through and my father and grandmother arrived in New York Harbor with nothing. They had nothing. My father even stayed at the Jewish Orphans Asylum in that borough for awhile.

But they did it legally and it worked and the family thrived.

In a certain kind of way, it is a classic American story.

This is the Great Twentieth-Century Immigrant American Story, so beloved by historians. My family was a poor immigrant family. My dad, Harry, ran in the streets of New York during the Depression and he once told me that he never met any adult who had not voted for Franklyn Roosevelt until he was into his twenties. He received a year of study at St. John's College at its original Bedford–Stuyvesant location in Brooklyn before drafted by the U.S. Army and dragged off to the central Pacific.

Kwajalein The Marshall Islands. Anawetok.

{Were it not for Harry Truman, Albert Einstein, and Julius Robert Oppenheimer, there is an excellent chance that I would not be here today.}

In any case, he was twenty-years-old, 135 pounds, and a corporal with a rifle slung over his shoulder. He ducked his head in fox-holes as Japanese snipers took potshots at the Americans from trees... knowing that they would die in the response. Like many old soldiers my father never really talked about the war and as far as I know, he never killed anybody in it... but they certainly tried to kill him.

When he came back home he finished his college education through the G.I. Bill of Rights and became a nice, middle-class accountant who moved into the suburbs while raising four kids... me being the youngest.

None of this was easy, but the system worked and it can still work for pretty much anyone from anywhere who wishes to honestly become a US citizen or simply a working resident.

Look at the current experience of Far East Asians or those from the Indian subcontinent. These are people that are exceeding both professionals of European descent, as well as Jews, in terms of income in this country. They are coming into the United States through regular legal channels and often do so carrying employment skills that help themselves, their families, and their newly adopted country.

The point, however, is that there is no good reason for Mexican nationals who wish to immigrate into the United States to merely show up at the border carrying babies. I am sorry, but that is against US law. If you break the law, as everyone knows, there is an excellent chance that you will be separated from other people, including your children, when they cart you off to prison or, in these circumstances, into a border detention facility.

In recent days, the Trump Administration - unlike the Obama Administration - put forth an executive order for the purpose of stopping that practice. Whether this will work out better or worse for the children themselves is open to debate.

It is often claimed that those seeking entrance into the United States are not so much economic migrants as they are asylum seekers. In some circumstances, this may very well be the case. There are any number of people under political persecution throughout Latin America that would much prefer to live outside of their home countries. Anyone in the Western Hemisphere fleeing political persecution should, in my opinion, be allowed to seek a safe-haven in the United States.

Presumably, however, the best way to do this is not through the breaking of the legal procedures of our country. The best way to become a US resident or citizen is through ordinary legal means. That is, introducing oneself into the country through breaking the law does not give your potential fellow citizens much faith in your intentions.

And it could get you separated from your kids.

I very much recommend against.

L.E.G.A.L.